“HPL in Brooklyn with kitties”. Another Playground.ai experiment, after Photoshop fixing. Playground.ai seems to know more about what Lovecraft looked like, now.
HPL in Brooklyn with kitties
16 Tuesday May 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts
Dark Adventure: The Shunned House
10 Wednesday May 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
New at the HPLHS, the next Dark Adventure full-cast recording. It’s Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House”, and is set to ship and download on 21st June 2023. Temporary cover artwork at present, so here’s my quick Dream by Wombo AI-generated image of the Providence house in its earlier days…
FHTAGN in English
06 Saturday May 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
The German Lovecraftians report, of their open-source ‘original Lovecraft’ FHTAGN role-playing game, that…
Dean Engelhardt […] has now translated the FHTAGN game world into English, made his own minor adjustments and published it as The Open Cthulhu Mythos SRD (System Reference Document) (2023).
This is now a pay-what-you-want Open Game License book on the DriveThruRPG store.
There is however still scope for a book designer / illustrator to swoop in and help out…
This PDF contains the text of a full set of game statistics describing the creatures, rituals, and artefacts from Lovecraft’s original Cthulhu Mythos. In OGL terms it is a “System Reference Document” (or SRD). [It is not yet] presented in a fully illustrated and typeset form as you would expect from a core RPG rulebook.
Which means…
[It is not an] all-in-one Cthulhu Mythos RPG corebook (which traditionally cover both rules and “world” in the one volume)
As it stand it may thus interest purist Mythos writers as well as gamers, being only about Lovecraft’s creations and with only a core of RPG mechanics currently added.
“… the flickering of the monstrous lights”
04 Thursday May 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Entry dates and full rules for the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, now available.
No “romantic comedies”, I see. They’re banned. Aww. Lovecraft wrote at least one of those (“Sweet Ermengarde”). But it seems the gore-loving masses must be forever deprived of a hilarious makeover for his “Ermengarde”. Imagine a tentacle-filled moustache-twirling Perils of Pauline silent-movie -style big-screen romp.
Anyway, the deadlines are now available:
August 2023 (Providence): 30th May 2023.
October 2023 (Portland): 1st August 2023.
Rodell D. Sanford Jr.
03 Wednesday May 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Via eBay, some real non-AI illustration. Here de-curved and colour-cast corrected (to the extent that’s possible without damaging the picture’s night-time mood). Not also up-scaled. Artwork by Rodell D. Sanford Jr., for what appears to be the first edition of Chaosium’s Lurking Fears RPG adventure anthology (inc. a Florida adventure, which it’s possible the cover depicts).
And another, from 1982, a painting but looking like it’s from the same artist…
Inked
03 Wednesday May 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
I had another play with AI image generation, this time tempted by the new “Ink v2” style-module at the mostly-free Dream by Wombo…
A bit closer to Lovecraft this time, rather than Nick Cage or 1920 silent movie-star Buster Keaton. Although a bit stiff and too much of a ‘the butler bid it’ feel, perhaps. That’s the problem with AI, the faces and heads often have a touch of the showroom dummy about them. But feel free to use this for your Lovecraftian projects, fanzines, blog posts debating AI, etc.
“Lovecraft, mon amour” – three shows for 2023
24 Monday Apr 2023
Posted in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts
Three performances of the stage play “Lovecraft, mon amour”, in the French city of Lyon. 28th – 29th April 2023.
A fantastic theatrical and musical biopic, which immerses us musically in America from the 1920s to 1947. The play begins in 1947, Sonia has just learned of the death of Lovecraft, ten years after his death. This news upsets her and provokes a torrent of memories. But she begins to have the strange impression that Howard is actually there with her. As they move from confidence to confidence, these two characters reconstruct the course of their thwarted, extraordinary, overwhelming love… Will Sonia recognise Howard? Is love stronger than death?
The Mould Shade Speaks
23 Sunday Apr 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
Deep Cuts has dug up the horror poem “The Mould Shade Speaks” (1919) by early Lovecraft collaborator Winifred Virginia Jackson.
… very little of Jackson’s poetry has been reprinted, and much of it is uncollected or largely inaccessible for those without access to newspaper archives and obscure and expensive amateur journals, although a selection of poems have been republished in the appendix to Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner and Others.
H.P. Lovecraft Motion Comic
22 Saturday Apr 2023
Posted in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts
Saturday-morning cartoons? Tentaclii has ’em! Newly uploaded to Archive.org, but made some years ago, a H.P. Lovecraft Motion Comic: The Rats In The Walls (2017). Excellent, even if we don’t get to see comic-book frames. 30 minutes, good narration. Also, it has Spanish subtitles here. Well worth watching.
The same maker also made H.P. Lovecraft Motion Comic: The Call Of Cthulhu (2015), which is on YouTube only.
Motion comics? They were partially animated comic-book-like animations made on the desktop PC with Adobe After Effects (not ideal) or (if you do a bit more research on software) with dedicated motion-comics software such as MotionArtist. Sadly they died off, despite portable HTML5 output, partly due to the additional labour needed to make them and partly due to the intensely conventional stance of the bulk of comic-book buyers. Maybe they’ll be revived, now that AI will be able to do some of the heavy lifting re: artwork, and now that comics buyers (different than readers) are a little less averse to ‘digital’.
MotionArtist 1.3, on which development stopped 2017. But it still works and can still be had if you look hard enough. It’s also well-documented and has abundant video tutorials.
A Suitable Flesh / Dredge
16 Sunday Apr 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Nightmare on Film Street reveals a new big-screen Lovecraft adaptation by director Joe Lynch…
“The thing that I loved about this particular script, which was originally based on the Lovecraft short story ‘The Thing on The Doorstep’, was the lineage involved … Brian Yuzna is one of our producers, who produced Re-Animator, and From Beyond, and directed Society. Dennis Paoli who wrote those movies, wrote this script.”
Sounds promising, and I see he has a half dozen big-screen movies to his credit. The title of the new movie is A Suitable Flesh, and it seems it hasn’t yet screened at a film festival. With Barbara Crampton.
Update: It will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2023.
Elsewhere, RPGFan reviews the much-touted Lovecraftian videogame Dredge…
While not a hardcore gaming experience, Dredge certainly sates the thirst for Lovecraftian vibes. … Authentically Lovecraftian.
Just one of an ongoing tidal wave of Lovecraftian games, including the newly remade mystery Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened.
“the toad-shaped… Tsathoggua… the seal”
14 Friday Apr 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A silver toad made by the Gorham Manufacturing Company, Providence, Rhode Island. In 1890, the year of Lovecraft’s birth. You’ll recall that Lovecraft’s father was, quite possibly, connected with the silverware firm in its heyday as a buyer or salesman.
Via the Smithsonian Open Access portal.
“Music from the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast” (Vol. 3, 2023)
12 Wednesday Apr 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Newly released on Bandcamp, Music from the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast – Volume Three (2023)…
Music used in episodes of The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast (hppodcraft.com), including material from the feature audio production The Colossus. Recorded in Santa Monica, CA.
Volumes One (2009) and Two (2011) are also available.